History

Main article: History of Massachusetts

See also: Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882). The Pilgrims were a group of Puritans who founded Plymouth in 1620.

Pre-colonization

Massachusetts was originally inhabited by tribes of the Algonquian language family such as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mahican, and Massachusett.^[73][74] While cultivation of crops like squash and corn supplemented their diets, these tribes were generally dependent on hunting, gathering and fishing for most of their food supply.^[73] Villages consisted of lodges called wigwams as well as longhouses,^[74] and tribes were led by male or female elders known as sachems.^[75]

Colonial period

In the early 1600s, after contact had been made with Europeans, large numbers of the indigenous peoples in the northeast of what is now the United States were killed by virgin soil epidemics such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and perhaps leptospirosis.^[76][77] Between 1617 and 1619, smallpox killed approximately 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Native Americans.^[78]
The first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, arrived via the Mayflower^[79] at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag people.^[80] This was the second successful permanent English colony in the part of North America that later became the United States, after the Jamestown Colony. The event known as the "First Thanksgiving" was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World which lasted for three days. The Pilgrims were soon followed by other Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony at present-day Boston in 1630.^[81]
The Puritans, who believed the Church of England needed to be purified and experienced harassment from English authority because of their beliefs,^[82] came to Massachusetts with the goal of establishing an ideal religious society.^[83] Unlike the Plymouth colony, the bay colony was founded under a royal charter in 1629.^[84] Both religious dissent and expansionism resulted in several new colonies being founded shortly after Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay elsewhere in New England. The Massachusetts Bay banished dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams due to religious and political disagreements. In 1636, Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island and Hutchinson joined him there several years later. Religious intolerance continued. Among those who objected to this later in the century were the English Quaker preachers Alice and Thomas Curwen, who were publicly flogged and imprisoned in Boston in 1676.^[85][86]

A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft by John Hale (Boston, 1697)

In 1641, Massachusetts expanded inland significantly, acquiring the Connecticut River Valley settlement of Springfield, which had recently disputed with, and defected from its original administrators, the Connecticut Colony.^[87] This established Massachusetts' southern border in the west,^[88] though surveying problems resulted in disputed territory until 1803–04.^[89]
In 1691, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were united (along with present-day Maine, which had previously been divided between Massachusetts and New York) into the Province of Massachusetts Bay.^[90] Shortly after the arrival of the new province's first governor, William Phips, the Salem witch trials took place, where a number of men and women were hanged for alleged witchcraft.^[91]
The most destructive earthquake yet known in New England occurred in 1755, causing considerable damage across Massachusetts.^[92][93]